Beer Advice, Beer Reviews, and Random Beer Thoughts

Five Beer Articles You Need To Read And Why, 6/15/16

There was a bounty of good articles today. Here are the five that I like best.

The closing of the Eden, NC brewing facility has become something of a thorn in the side of the ABInbev-MillerCoors merger. The announcement of the closure was just before the announcement of the merger. The facility produces 4% of all the MillerCoors in the United States but is being closed for reasons that maybe don’t exist. The reason most people think it is being closed is that it would be redundant to a Budweiser facility that is very close in Virginia. The other problem surrounding the facility is it was built very recently and is one of the major employers in the small city of Eden. Unfortunately, I don’t think all of that shadiness will keep the facility open or even provide a speed bump for the merger.

The state of New York actually did alcohol regulation reform right. They took their time and created a comprehensive reform from top to bottom, instead of doing all the regulation piecemeal and having to fight for each proposal individually. This approach has one major advantage in a legislative sense: It brings everyone to the table at once. That allows for everyone to see how the whole system will work for everyone. Compare this to what happens in other states when old and established alcohol laws are being overturned.

Fourteen craft brewers in Colorado are leaving the Colorado Brewers Guild after the Guild’s failure to stop the grocery store full strength beer law. The fourteen insurrectionists want a more proactive advocacy group that will keep laws like this from coming up for a vote they were always going to be on the wrong side of once consumers get involved. I understand the brewer’s frustrations with the new law as it changes the way breweries have always done business. After reading a bit on this law, the idea of changing to law to allow grocery stores to sell full-strength beer has been around for longer than the Brewers Guild has existed. This was just finally the year when it broke through. This rebellion seems a bit more complicated than just this one instance.